Christine Göttler is currently writing a book entitled “Fluid Worlds,” which explores Rubens’s engagement with the global world of seventeenth-century Antwerp and the city’s long history of craftsmanship, material expertise, and (hidden) knowledge. She is also working with Sven Dupré on the volume “Reading the Inventory: The Worlds and Possessions of the Portuguese Merchant-Banker Emmanuel Ximenez (1564–1632) in Antwerp,” where the focus is on the converso merchant-banker’s involvement in the city’s artisanal, commercial, and scholarly culture.
She continues to do research and publish on early modern elemental imaginaries and the ways in which artists thought of and pictured hidden natural and supernatural forces.
Publications
“Haunted Landscapes: Joseph Werner’s Ghosts,” in Painting as Discourse (1400–1700), ed. Ingrid Falque, Walter Melion, and Michel Weemans (Leiden: Brill, 2026); forthcoming.
"Fire, Sulfur, Salt: Elemental Transformation in Depictions of the Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah," in Elemental Forces: Properties, Combinations, and Transformations, ed. Thalia Allington-Wood, Sophie Morris, Claudia Swan, and Rebecca Zorach (Leiden: Brill, 2026); forthcoming.
Activities and Events
Guest Scholar, Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, Max Planck Institute. 16 March to 15 April 2026
Speaker in the Research Seminar Water-Worlds, organized by Alexandre Claude and Giulia Simonini, 25 March 2026, Bibliotheca Hertziana, Max Planck Institute for Art History, Rome.
AORUM. Pour une histoire matérielle de l’art. L’or et ses usages dans la peinture de la première modernité. Seminaire, Institut national d’histoire de l’art, Galerie Colbert, Paris, organized by Romain Thomas, June 2. “L’imaginaire de l’or à l’âge de l’argent: Peter Paul Rubens, Philippe IV d’Espagne et les monnayeurs d'Anvers.”
Host, Relic, Image: Signification and Materiality in Early Modern Christianity, organized by Walter S. Melion, Wietse de Boer, and Anna Dlabačová, Emory University, Lovis Corinth Symposium, December 3–5, 2026: “Religious materiality in uncertain times: The chapel of Francisco Lopes Franco y Feo and Mariana Franca in the church of the Friars Minor in Antwerp (ca. 1650).”